The present invention is directed to the printing arts. More particularly, this invention is directed to a method of printing on a paper web and a manufacturing system which includes flexographic, letter press and dry offset printers.
The invention is particularly applicable to the printing of booklets of bingo sheets. However, it should be appreciated by those of average skill in the art that the method and apparatus disclosed herein could also be employed for printing a variety of other types of printed matter, including checks, business forms or advertising brochures.
It has now become popular in the playing of bingo to purchase a booklet of bingo sheets which each have one or more bingo faces printed thereon. These booklets comprise multiple sheets of bingo paper, one stacked upon the other, with the paper sheets being glued at one edge to form a booklet. The number of sheets in a booklet is indicated by the term "up." Thus a 10 UP booklet means a booklet having ten sheets. Each sheet typically contains a number of bingo faces indicated by the term "ON." These can range from a 1 ON to a 36 ON, or more. A respective one of these sheets is played, one at a time, during a bingo game. When a player arrives at the bingo hall, he purchases one or more booklets. Each booklet contains one sheet for each game of the evening. The player would then play all of the bingo faces on the first sheet for the first game and mark these sheets with an ink marker, or ink dauber, as each of the numbers is called. Once a winner is declared and the game is over, the player merely removes the top sheet from the booklet and plays the next game on the second sheet. The marked first sheet is discarded.
As bingo has become more popular, bingo games have included as many as one thousand players, each one using twelve, eighteen or more bingo faces simultaneously, on anywhere from twenty to thirty games. A bingo hall operator can thus use up over 400,000 bingo faces in a single night.
Since a large number of people usually play bingo at the same time, it is highly desirable that each of the persons playing bingo have different non-duplicative bingo faces on their sheets in order to reduce the possibility that more than one person would win at the same time by having the identical bingo face. Therefore, it is desirable to be able to print a large number of different bingo faces on bingo sheets in order to reduce the occurrence of prize-splitting.
A security problem also exists with bingo sheets. Players have been known to attempt to cheat in a particular bingo game by bringing in bingo paper from another game or from a prior session. The player would then claim to win by declaring a bingo on a sheet of paper not purchased at the beginning of the bingo session, or not the sheet then being played in the stack of sheets. It would be advantageous, therefore, to allow a bingo hall operator to provide maximum game integrity and security so as to prevent such manipulation.
Currently, each booklet in a stack of bingo game booklets available for sale before a bingo session, is separated from the adjacent booklets by a sheet of wax paper. This enables the operator to readily detach each booklet from the stack for sale. However, wax paper adds to the weight of the stack of booklets. From the perspective of the bingo game operator, it would be desirable to reduce the weight of stacks of bingo game booklets distributed before each game. This would result in easier handling of the stacks of bingo game booklets by the operators of the bingo hall, as well as lessening the freight costs and scrap or waste paper.
A difficulty with currently manufactured bingo game booklets is that no bingo game printing apparatus currently exists which allows a bingo paper manufacturer to print a plurality of bingo sheets, wherein the bingo faces on different sheets are identified by different indicia but the bingo sheets have a common identifying numeral on each bingo face of each sheet. The only way that a manufacturer can currently produce such a product is by separately printing the bingo sheets with different indicia and a common identification number and then hand collating these sheets into bingo game booklets. Obviously, this is a disadvantageous, slow and expensive technique. It is also difficult to ensure that each and every booklet has exactly the same sequence of sheets when the booklet contains a large number of sheets, such as, e.g. twenty to thirty or more sheets.
Accordingly, it has been considered desirable to develop a new and improved method and apparatus for printing on a web of paper which would overcome the foregoing difficulties and others while providing better and more advantageous overall results.